How we change through the years and how our childhood affects our adulthood is fascinating to me. What we choose to build on or use as stepping stones to a better life and what we let slow us down and stop us can often be the same.
When I was very young, summers were for bare feet and by the time the first school bell rang after Labor Day weekend our little soles were thick and tough and even the scorching southern streets didn't faze us as we raced to vacant lots and remnants of farms that had yet to be razed and commercialized. We were in Houston and born at the tail end of the baby boom generation. "Space City" was a new nickname for the Bayou City and a steady influx of families from other cities and other states came to Houston so fathers could work for NASA, engineering firms and oil and gas companies. The city and the times were changing but our little piece of it, through the 1960s, was a bubble not yet popped by progress.
I remember my father staying home on Sunday mornings and making a big breakfast while we went to Mass. I remember wearing stiff petticoats, my mother licking her hand and flattening stray hairs on my head and I remember inwardly cringing when I did the very same thing, more than 20 years later, to my own daughter. I remember smelling bacon and syrup before we even opened the door on Sunday mornings. I don't recall if this happened every Sunday or that I remember it because it happened once and was so unusual. It's interesting how our memories work or don't work and what we choose to remember and what we choose to let go.
We felt insulated. We observed grown ups but didn't fully comprehend adult lives and how messy they often become. By the time we were almost teens we got it. We got how complicated life can be. We started to understand that other people's messy lives can spill over into ours and that big puddles of problems seep into and widen our own emotional cracks and fissures. We ceased play. Our hard little soles softened and our inner souls hardened. It would take some serious adult introspection, maybe some therapy, definitely an earnest search for inner peace and hundreds of heart to hearts with God and friends before some of us felt the cracks and fissures start to close and mend.
All this reflection was stirred this morning. You know those "25 Things About Me" posts that appear on social media sites? People spill their guts and tell their friends 25 personality traits or habits that make them tick. They intersperse a few comedic points so no one thinks they're whack jobs. I just read one, posted on a friend's page but not written by my friend, that made me cry the ugly cry. There was no comedy...just 25 heartbreaking comments written by a person with a sad heart. I've met enough abuse survivors to realize that her writing, even though she didn't acknowledge it, came from a very dark place.
I have always been an emotional sponge. I hate to see hurting people and animals. I catch the lizards and put them outside. I chase moths and crickets who stray inside and, with my bare hands, scoop them up and carry them to freedom. Last week, I had to mentally restrain myself from inviting the Apple store employee to come home with us after he said he was having a hard time meeting people in Los Angeles. I have to step back and not try and make it all better when one of my adult children is going through a crisis. When I was that little girl who ran barefoot through our big back yard on humid Houston nights I refused to catch lightning bugs and put them in jars. In 1967, a friend had a glittered and bejeweled cockroach on a little tiny chain, bought at a tacky traveling carnival kiosk. For a day she wore it pinned to her shirt. It crawled in circles around her blouse. I wasn't repulsed by the cockroach. I was repulsed that someone would act so inhumanely.
I'm not applying for sainthood. I confess that I sometimes say barbed words that pierce my loved ones' hearts. It's trite but true...you do hurt the ones you love. My saving grace is that I have learned to be quick with an apology and that wisdom, if you let it, really does grow with age. I realize that most barbed comments come from a place of insecurity. Confession complete.
Now the woman who posted the "25 Things" is sucked into my spongy brain and I'm afraid she will be there for awhile. I don't know her. I hope her friends who have read it will reach out. It's only recently that I chose to see some of my own stumbling blocks as stepping stones and I wish for her the same.
